Thursday, August 18, 2011

In the previous LawPundit posting we did not discuss the Apple claim that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringed on the iPad2 because (using our English translation from the original German-language motion): "Tab 10.1 copies the prominent thin profile of the iPad2".

Alas, dear Apple, you are at least 2000 years too late in your design claim for "thin" writing tablets. You were preceded by the "wafer thin" Vindolanda wooden tablets, which are dated to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.

"The Vindolanda tablets are "the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain".[1][2] Written on fragments of thin, post-card sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian's Wall). Although similar records on papyrus were known from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley discovered these artefacts at the site of a Roman fort in Vindolanda, northern England.[1][3]"

When we look at these 2000-year old tablets, we see that not too much has changed in the shape of the "outer" rectangular design for ""thin" tablet writing that Apple has in fact copied from our forebears and to which it is wrongfully and shamefully trying to claim exclusive rights.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

One of the most useful books I ever read was Robert Ardrey's Territorial Imperative. Hat tip to CaryGEE. Considered outdated by some -- we disagree, the book remains essential to understand ancient history and also modern current events.

"Politics is rooted in territory. State-building, war-making, pork-barreling, gerrymandering -- the examples are legion. Much the same can be said about markets, which allocate resources not just to firms, sectors, factors of production, and individuals, but also to subdivisions of the national space. Indeed, the spatial dimension of the political economy is so prevalent that it is easily, if not frequently, overlooked."

"Jeffrey Baldwin, a Hillsborough resident and licensed surveyor since 1991 who has been chief surveyor for the Somerset County Engineering Department for about six years, said that surveying is one of the world's oldest professions, dating to ancient Egyptians who mapped out parcels of land to assess taxes. Many historical figures, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, have been surveyors.

'We like to look up at Mount Rushmore and say that it's three surveyors and some other guy,'' Baldwin joked."

There is a reason that three of America's greatest Presidents were previously land surveyors. You have to understand land to rule.

I say that as someone who also worked on a land survey team in my college days.

One reason why archaeologists and similar professions are often far off the mark in their historical theories about the past is that they are generally people who do not understand the importance of land and land survey to ancient cultures.

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